Placement visits provide golden opportunities for reflection and learning. For noticing. For remembering the things that might have gotten lost in the midst of the all of the other stuff.

Recently, I was once again reminded of the centrality of care in all that we do as teachers. I listened to a teacher who spoke of his desire to care for his post-primary students, to look after them, to make sure they felt safe and happy when they were in his class. He described the challenges they face daily – social media overload , substance abuse, disconnection, exam pressure. He wants to ‘teach’ them, and to make sure that they do well in their exams. But what he really wants for them he said, is for them to remember happy moments in school when they felt good about themselves. And that reminded me.

It reminded me of an encounter I had with a past student not so long ago. A child many of us tried to teach, but feel that we failed in that regard. He challenged us in every way, and it was always clear that what he needed was care. And plenty of it.

He came along the street outside the school one day as I was getting into my car, a big smile and a cheery hello as he stared at the big blue door at the front of the school.

‘Is Carmel still doing the hot dinners?’ he asked?

‘She is’ I replied, smiling at this, his first memory of his formative years in school.

‘Does she still have the little blue bowls?’ he asked next.

‘She does’ I answered.

‘I loved the sheperd’s pie’ he concluded wistfully.

A hot dinner in a little blue bowl. What a memory to take from your first years in school. Food, a basic need according to Maslow. Right down there at the very bottom of the triangle. But right up there at the top of his memory bank.

It made me think again, as I have done many times about the curriculum, the resources, the programmes, the technology, the endless targets. They matter, of course they all matter. And no doubt a longer conversation with the student would have yielded further memories of those exciting SESE lessons when the caterpillars turned into butterflies, and the fun that we had playing Maths games on the iPads. But those were not the memories that immediately sprang to mind when he walked down that street.

The first thing that he remembered as he looked longingly at his old infant school, was a feeling of being cared for.